Re: I guess this is lawyer talk for..

"so many local rags do it with all the pissing adverts and crap they have on their site to "make money". The amount of times you'll visit their sites on phones and get fake AV pop-up adverts. Some ones from up North I've had this happen with. All because whoever is coding their site, isn't checking the legitness (is that a word?) of the code they are embedding."

The big offender for this is ad auction exchanges like Google DFP. Occasionally bad code slips through the exchange's filters and wins up winning a bid and gets placed on my site like any other ad. It gets caught pretty quickly but never quick enough. But we're in to do nothing but review code, there aren't enough hours in the day for me to audit the code behind each and every ad served up via DFP.

Of course i wouldn't put a DFP ad slot on a payment page, either. I'm plenty stupid but I'm not that stupid

Re: Bad bargaining

I wish I could. But a story with a stick image will get read more than one without. It'll also get about twice as much reach on Facebook.

Also you generally don't get stock images from AP. News shooters tend to shoot very specific images that make lousy stock photos. And whatever contact the BBC has with Getty you can bet it's costing aunty a ton on cash - Getty ain't cheap.

Re: Does Google really not get it?

Major advertisers are trying to build brand awareness as much as anything. They don't think you'll buy a widget today. They just want you to think of their widgets when u finally do.

The 'half my advertising is wasted line was from a Philadelphia department store mogul way back in the day. He wasn't wrong. But for advertising quotes I prefer the line from a NY Post ad pitch: 'But your readers are our shoplifters.'

Re: Can't remember the last time I...

But nobody cares about grumpy olds. All they do is lower CPM. Online ads aren't quite as bad as TV in this respect, but it's getting there. Depending on the market, the minute you hit 54, or 49, or even 34(!) you're dead to them.

Re: Good sub-ed needed....

Works for news

This approach probably works OK for the NYT.

News apps often need to be built fast - an extra day or two working on deployment is a much bigger deal for him then it is for most CTOs.

They also don't have a real long lifespan - a few will stay up for at least a year or two, but most will have a lifespan of weeks or months. By the time the stack you're locked into sucks it's ancient history.

Finally, they use pretty much exclusively public data with a goal of getting it to the public.

Hosting everything on someone else's infrastructure is fine for him. But I can't think of any other industry where that's as true.